Watching Proof

On a whim, I decided to get a ticket for Proof together with some of the Art Festival events in late May and June.

Proof is an award winning play which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and 2001 Tony Award for Best Play, as well as being adapted into a movie in 2005 with Gwyneth Paltrow.

The play centres around Catherine, a depressed college dropout, who has stayed at home and cared for her father Robert, a mathematical genius who suffered from mental illness. She later forms a friendship and relationship with Hal, a former student of her father's. When Hal discovers in one of Robert’s notebooks a proof of a theorem that mathematicians had thought impossible, Catherine stuns Hal by claiming she wrote the proof. But life is not as elegant as a mathematical theorem, when doubt enters into her relationships, the fallback gives the audience a view into the characters' different psyches.

It was my first time watching a Wessex Theater production, they were a new company that I was unfamiliar with. The stage was plain, the actors were okay. I especially liked the rapport between the actors that played Catherine, the daughter and Robert, the father, but honestly, the actors felt like they were just reciting lines and acting out cues instead of feeding off each others' energies. Another thing to note is that the intermission music between acts does affect the audience's reaction to the play, playing the same irritating classical piece over and over again, does not endear one to the play, nor create a sense of anticipation for the next act.

Bought a ticket to Top Girls, another Wessex Theater production, hopefully that would be better. Off tomorrow to see Helios, the opening of the Singapore Arts Festival at the Marina Barrage